# Adaptive Causal Alignment for High-Confidence Adversarial Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03925 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03925/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Theoretically Principled Trade-off between Robustness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08573/) (2019)
- [Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01690/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Training for Free!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12843/) (2019)
- [Unlabeled Data Improves Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13736/) (2019)
- [Noise or Signal: The Role of Image Backgrounds in Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09994/) (2020)
- [Minimally distorted Adversarial Examples with a Fast Adaptive Boundary Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02044/) (2019)
- [Defense against Adversarial Attacks Using High-Level Representation Guided Denoiser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02976/) (2017)
- [SOLO: Segmenting Objects by Locations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04488/) (2019)
- [Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07828/) (2016)
- [Simple Black-box Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07121/) (2019)
- [Improving Robustness using Generated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09468/) (2021)
- [Better Diffusion Models Further Improve Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04638/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Adversarial Training for ImageNet: Architectures, Training and Generalization across Threat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01870/) (2023)
- [Adversarial vulnerability for any classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08686/) (2018)
- [When Adversarial Training Meets Vision Transformers: Recipes from Training to Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07540/) (2022)
- [Guided Adversarial Attack for Evaluating and Enhancing Adversarial Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14969/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inverse adversarial training leverages high-confidence predictions to stabilize robust learning, yet we uncover a critical paradox: high confidence often stems from overfitting to non-causal background correlations rather than intrinsic object semantics. Our investigation reveals that visual context functions as a dual-natured signal, serving as either a necessary supportive prior or a spurious confounder. This insight renders existing blind suppression strategies flawed, as they inevitably lead to severe Feature Loss. To resolve this, we propose High-Confidence Causally Aligned Training (HICAT), a unified framework that establishes a Semantic Equilibrium. Operating on a ``Measure-Debias-Align'' pipeline, HICAT integrates a Learnable Background-Bias Estimator (LBBE) to adaptively diagnose context utility. Guided by this diagnosis, an Adaptive Debiasing mechanism performs surgical logit rectification, complemented by a geometrically grounded Foreground Logit Orthogonal Enhancement (FLOE) loss to enforce rigorous feature disentanglement. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K demonstrate that HICAT consistently improves over matched baselines across diverse architectures (CNNs and ViTs) while significantly reducing the robust generalization gap.